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Time
magazine’s notice
was particular; it spoke of riot and intrusion, an infant war: it
named Malawi. So Malawi was important. Murder, the equatorial
commonplace, mattered to the world; a rumor of death had put Malawi on
the American projection of the map, as tulips had done for Holland.
It is in Malawi,
a tiny Central African republic caught between dictator and agitator,
that Paul Theroux’s brilliant new novel takes place. Here are tested
the ideals of two men, an American fired with zeal to dispense life
insurance to Africans and a messianic white revolutionary whose
specialty is bombs. When Calvin Mullet of Homemakers’ Mutual is taken
prisoner by the ruthless Marais and attempts to sell him a policy,
their lives become strangely and irrevocably linked.
One pursues
his guerrilla war and the other his proselytization of instant
security. But each in his own way is forced to see how inadequate his
ideals are and must face the apathy or malice of those whom he
believed he could save. Tied to the spartan life and harsh judgments
of the mercenary leader, Marais fights bitterly to hold together his
ragged band of Africans and maintain their purpose. For Calvin, life
becomes, if not easier, less rigorous once he recognizes the futility
of his ambitions and turns to the slovenly comforts of Auntie Zeeba’s
Eating House, the congenial brothel where he makes a home for his
black wife.
But when,
finally, the manuscript which Calvin has toyed with and rejected in
disgust - - the fictitious diary of a downtrodden and uninsured
African -- is stolen and adopted as the bible of Marais’s followers,
it appears inevitable that the American should be drawn into the
impending explosion of violence. |
